Not really ready for the cold

Been chilled recently. 50s and 100% humidity can do that... still, with the rain it's been tough for me to get out and run, without a race to train for.

I've got the lazies. Kind of a not good thing for a coach to have. And I don't think I've had a summer yet. I never do, until I feel all the chill that was frozen into my bones (and there was a lot this winter) has been baked out. A couple of 80 or 90 degree runs don't do it. Need hot temps for about a week before I really start to complain.

Believe me, I'm much happier running in the cold. But I don't appreciate it enough, till I've had my fill of the heat. And this summer just hasn't provided yet. I don't know that I hope it does, but I've hoped for more stupid things...

Well.... that sucked

I think my shin hates asphalt and loathes concrete. One terrible run today makes me think about chopping the damn thing off and going with one of those spoon shaped lower leg things.

Damnit to all hell, and points further south.

Food

Maybe 2500 calories, and I ran maybe 6-7 miles. Though I'm not really sure how much alcohol I drank....

It may not be a news flash to anyone but me, but I gotta say that pub runs are fun! :)

Food

I've begun to keep track of food intake; it might work out, or it might just kind of fall by the way side like it has in the past. Sometimes after reaching a goal, somtimes because I'm just kind of lazy.

Anyway, ball park figure of total calories consumed yesterday: 3300. Since I didn't run, I probably burned ~2500. Uh-oh. :P

Lethergic

A cost to the hill work from yesterday is a deep sense of ennui today. Meaning the vague feeling of wanting to do 17 miles today (I was off work- that's how I would have the time) came out to a total of zero miles run.

This isn't a bad thing, though. I want to stay in the 40-50 miles this week. With everything that I have scheduled, if I had run 17 today I'd finish just shy of 70. Which wouldn't be so good, even when they're easy miles.

Hill Training!

Went running through Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills yesterday. It's one of the few places around that seems to organically incorporate nature and human presence. Not try to dominate, which was pretty nice.

Has some nice hills, too. :)

Nine weeks (and change) to Bayshore

Nine weeks doesn't seem all that much. A little over two months.

Training has been going fairly well. No snafus as of yet; injury and illness have been held off, thankfully. Perhaps some mental/emotional/physical fatigue, but that's fairly par for the course. Speedwork starts next week, and that's a big jump in challenge so far as the training is concerned.

Upping my cadence to 90 strides per minute has been an interesting experience. It's drained a little bit of the relaxed feeling I get from running, but I figure I'll get it back when I settle into the new form. And upping turn over is a big key to getting faster, from what I understand.

The weather change has been nice. I just kind of wish that I could have worked more of my runs in with people. Oh well, such is life.

So, 19 weeks to Bayshore.

Next week I begin my program; I'm following the Pfitzinger/Douglas method. Ought to be interesting.

Last week I Snowshoed for about 22 miles and ran for about 28. 50 Miles, which isn't half bad. This up coming week... well. I'll probably take it relatively easy. I'm going up north for a 10K snowshoe race, but I'd like to get 30 miles of running/snow shoeing in before then.

Glad today way my off day. The rest of the week should be fun!

No real hunger to go running for the past few days; I've skipped three group runs and a race since Saturday. I've only gone once, and cut it in half. Life is like that, sometimes.

Recovery...

Just finished week three of a four week recovery plan. 40 odd miles, which felt pretty nice. A bit of soreness in the morning that resolved itself fairly quickly. One week to go.

Week after next, my first short race of the season, hopefully to be followed by a turkey trot and jingle bell run. I'm getting hungrier. I want to put in some harder, faster miles. I want to earn some PRs this year, even though I've scored bunches in most of the races I've run. It's easy- they were all new distances.

So I guess I shouldn't sulk. I'm sure I'll have a recap at the end of the year, but so far I've set a PR in the 3 mile, 4 Mile, 7K, half marathon (2X), full marathon (trail), 50k, and 40 mile and Olympic distance Tri.

Huh... the only race this year that I didn't set a PR in was a 10K, and I think it's because I went from an extremely flat and fast route last year to a pretty hilly route this year. And I still have a couple of 10Ks left as possibilities.

I may have to do some uptempo runs in the next couple of weeks, just for fun. I wonder how I'll do...

Sadly, I'm not hungry

So, my 40 mile race went well.

I published in livejournal because I'm an inconsistant git, and am out of practice of posting here. No surprise. Anyway, I did it because I wasn't really sure that i could- there was a lot of training and things come up along the way, and all that good stuff.

My plan was to do this race, recover, and then start off from a base of maybe 50 miles per week. I wanted to to build up distance till 70 miles per week was normal, and then incorporate speed work in preparation to try to qualify for Boston.

But I'm not hungry to qualify for Boston, and that's a pretty big stumbling block. Maintaining a 7:15 pace for a marathon isn't so easy if you don't really have a hunger for it. Perhaps I'll get it when I've recovered from the ultra, but right now I'm not even certain which races I'd like to do. There are bunches of halfs and full and stuff that I could do, but... well. You know how it goes. Too many choices can be harder to deal with than too few.

Decisions, decisions...

Fatigue is setting in...

From this last November to April, I had been doing a pretty consistent, moderate to high milage schedule. A few weeks were about 30 miles, but most were in the 40s, 50s and even one or two in the 60s.

My body adapted. I didn't feel sore, achy, or even all that tired. I just did it, and it was good.

May and June kind ruined that for me, and now that I'm building miles again, it's getting tough. My muscles aren't all that pleased, and I'm feeling sore after runs that back in the day were pretty shrug worthy.

All part of the game, but still.... I would have thought that I'd have learned by now.

Hungry Duck Half- the return to duckland!

2nd annual Hungry Duck Run in Brighton, MI. It just so happened that I was able to come home on Thursday, run the race on Friday, and do a few more nostalgic type runs on Saturday and Sunday. Oh, and hang out with family. But that's not the focus of this blog, right? ;)

Anyway, it was a perfect day for a race- mid 50s, a little wind, crisp and beautiful. PR weather, as a good friend of mine called it. And it seemed to be exactly that... three of us who ran the half got PRs; I improved my half marathon time by 5 minutes, which was kind of nice.

I went out with the idea that I'd shoot for a 7:30-7:40 pace for the first half, and then cut it down to a 7:25-7:20 pace for the second half. They way it worked was I did the first half in ~49 minutes, and the second half in ~48. Meaning a 7:25/7:15 split, in rough terms. Wish is pretty good, when all is said and done. And quite pleasing, really.

It got my a 3rd AG award, which was nice. But it would've landed me in 7th if I were 35 rather than 34. So, as I've often stated in the past: "I'd better get faster before I get older"

Yay fun races!

Week in Review

Today I started training for the Triple Lakes 40 Mile. it was a good week, and having something for which to train makes all the difference in the world.

Let me see...

M- rest
Tu- 6
W- 6.25
Th- 8.25
F- 9.0
Sa- rest
Su- 6.75

Total of 36.25 miles in 5:24:14; an average pace of 8:57. it's a lot easier to run these days with heat only being in the 80s.

My plan for next week is to run 38-40 miles, all things going well. I have my VO2 max test on Thursday, which may screw up my group run with Godiva. But thems the breaks. If I'm lucky, I might be able to get there in time to catch up, if I push hard enough. I will almost certainly catch them on the way back, if everything goes well. If the test doesn't take too much out of me.

I guess that'll be my speed workout. I might do some speed play between now and then. But only a few pick ups just to remind my body that it can go fast.

VO2 max with LT

So I signed up for a VO2 max test with lactate balance. They may even be able to hook me up to a EKG for kicks and to see if my heart might want to flip into a-fib.

it's pretty exciting... I'm thinking I'll probably test in the 40s somewhere. I push against the O2 deprivation spot pretty easily and regularly even when running an "easy" run.

it's funny- they fellow with whom I talked to in order to set up the eval is someone that I fitted into shoes. He really likes them, so it appears that I did a satisfactory job.

I want this to help me in my training for the 40 miler.
I want to have an excellent training cycle and do it again in six months to see if there are any improvements.
I want it to be an enlightening experience, and a lot of fun, too.
But, as with everything, I'll take what I can get. :)

Excitement

I'm getting excited about running in a way I haven't been in a while.

Goals are a nice thing. New PRs, new distances, new experiences- they have a way of getting the juices flowing. Even though this has been a year of new for me- I really haven't been intensely excited about much of anything since Umstead in March. Not coincidentally, that was when I last updated this blog.

Even though I've run and done well in a number of races, I wasn't really deeply excited about them... I knew I could PR in the half marathon. I knew I could finish an Olympic distance tri. They were more just things to fill up the time.

But I'm far more excited about the possibility of doing a 40 mile trail run in October than I have been about... well... many things. I think I'm more excited to go home July 4 weekend. But it's very different.

I'm not wholly sure if I can do it.
I'm going to be very excited to try.

Marathon training...

Decisions, decisions. The only thing I'm good at is indecision, so this makes life interesting.

First off, there's a trail marathon in 16 weeks. October 4th, which is a weekend I have off, and would seem to fit pretty well.

There is, however, a 40 miler. same place same time. Uh-oh.

Also, there are a couple of other marathons later on in the year that are tweaking my fancy- either of them would be a decent place to BQ, if BQing is possibly in the cards for me.

plans are swirling and swirling...

Switching back to LJ

I think I'm going to be moving my training blog back over to my spot on Livejournal. This was a fun experiment, and I like the interface better than LJs, but I think when I'm trying to compartmentalize my life between training here and everything else there, both suffer. So starting with my Umstead Marathon race report.

That is, if I survive. :)

Of course, I'm also dividing time by jumping on the twitter bandwagon but that's a different sort of writing.

Foam Roller

A few weeks back I got a foam roller from Amazon; it's been an interesting addition to my training. Mostly I use it to work on my IT band, calfs and hamstrings, though I suppose I'll be adding my quads sometime soon.

But it's painful, like a good massage is painful. And it's the first time I ever truly, actively felt a muscle knot go away. After I located it, I just rested my body weight on it and said I'd count to 70, bear the pain, and move on if nothing happened. Right around count 30, I was able to relax the muscles around the knot. Near 65, the muscle started spasming. At 80, the muscle knot was in its death throes. At 90, it had melted away, and felt... well... a little weird.

There have been times after using the roller that I've felt taller on my right side, if that makes sense. There have been times when I've been in enough pain that I've wondered if I'm damaging myself. But I've never felt anything like the muscle knot going away, before. I've given massages that have coaxed knots to give up the ghost. I've had massages done to me that have cured both a screwed up gait and what I thought was unrelated pain.

I can't say that I'll love my foam roller as much as my Garmin. But if I use it regularly and intelligently, it may be just as useful as, say, Gu. Which is pretty high up, just under proper shoes, good socks, and apparel. :)

U minus 5

Five days to the Umstead marathon.

Five days to see if this new methodology of run training will work out well, or leave me splattered against the wall at mile 18.

Five days to freak out about every little ache or pain, real or imagined, carbo-load, worry about nutrition, ponder every step of every run, pour over the map and over think everything.

there is nothing I can do, as of now, to make my fitness for the race any better. but there's an awful lot I can do to mess up my race experience.

The time I cut off from my two road marathons will be my test. In Detroit I went from 4:46 to 3:39, a 1:07 drop. It's my goal to go from 5:13 (at the '07 trail marathon) to 4:06. If I can beat that, then I'll have figured that my training was a success. Granted, the terrain is more difficult.

But what's like without a little challenge? :)